Tomorrow, the Things We Want But In Having, Reject
Out of Fear
Just like the ocean, we get by
with only the basic information.
We overload on it until our wounds
turn crooked and overlap
like they’ve forgotten
where they were going.
Today we line up to view
the precise list of things
we cannot have.
Someone picks up a camera.
This is usually the case.
Instead of cheese, they say
fat chance or my body still manifests
perception by vibration alone.
There is mild applause.
What looks like a gene is really
the original fetal position.
It would applaud
if it knew how,
but it just waits around
for 3000 years.
The Graph of Desire
Huffy Henry henried the corner
dripping drool on desk arm,
barely watching. Kolaptō had him
down of course, pulled him
out of the air like a balloon
by its tail, zapped him up
with the lightning.
Kid Cumulus jumps from his row
in back of Lacan’s lecture hall
where the old master draws
his penis diagrams on the chalkboard,
huge and tumescent.
The Kid vaults students
in the next row. His classmates—
dull/French—catch and hold him back
like a movie in their heads.
He spits zippers, reacquaints himself
with palm fronds, opens his bowels
for the music roaring through.
Kid cupholders his ancestors
with answers, cats the rosaries,
wraps his finger with the future
and points it straight back
at the professor.
All the faces are the same
Henry and Bones, Kolaptō
and Kid, Alberto and Ricardo,
Deleuze and Guattari,
all chanting,
all symbolic chains
folding into the lattice
of Skypenis
that abides above all.
At the point where desire
is durationless, Kid Cumulus
rains down insults
on the phallus and it works:
new trees grow
from the tile.
Kid Cumulus hovers
three inches off the ground
for the rest of his natural life.
Cumulus Ah Um
Kid Cumulus forgets his name
and goes hunting for it
in the forest of proper nouns,
cutting his own trail,
cutting his friends in half
to peer through the telescope
of their intestines
to climb the rungs of their sex
into the dripping moon.
Meanwhile, I invented
a kind of June music
using only ping pong balls
and melancholy. Been playing
Special Rider Blues for months.
I'm going way out yonder
then back again
like a touch or torch
on the back of my hand.
Well friend, well,
keep on, keep on peeling
my skin
into an orchid
of distance.
Kid comes back
crowned the king
of nothing.
What Will Happen
In the river within the river,
I am the air.
The way death helped me
to remember death
by dying.
I am a pure currency
that the mountain knows
how to spend.
Everyone who comes
into my field of vision
dies when they leave it.
Just the other day
for example, I fell in love
with distance,
left the horizon
but my silhouette would stay
there indelibly like no river
before me.
Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and his work appears in Poetry Northwest, Action Spectacle, The Texas Review, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Afternoon Visitor, HAD, Tyger Quarterly, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap), and micros from Ghost City and Rinky Dink. He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.
